Brutal attack prompts Spanish PM to hold hate crime meeting

September 7, 2021

MADRID (AP) — Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez is convening an urgent meeting of a committee that oversees efforts to fight hate crime after hooded attackers beat a 20-year-old man in Madrid and used a knife to carve a slur on one of his buttocks.

Sánchez wants to “take a personal lead” on the issue and will attend the meeting, government spokeswoman Isabel Rodríguez said Tuesday after a Cabinet meeting.

She said that “an attack like this ... alarms us all as a society.”

In the attack last Sunday afternoon, the man was assaulted as he entered the apartment building where he lived in a neighborhood of the Spanish capital.

The assailants first shouted anti-gay profanities at him, before slashing his mouth with a knife and then using it to etch a slur on his rear, according to police sources quoted by Spanish news agencies EFE and Europa Press.

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